Title: Sweden's Dark Past: Forced Sterilization and Eugenics Program

 Between 1934 and 1976, Sweden implemented a eugenics program based on the science of racial biology, aimed at "eliminating a certain type of people: the weakest."

Kjell Sundstedt's family never spoke about the darkest moment in their past.

"It was a secret that nobody dared to talk about. Society felt ashamed that people were being forced to be sterilized," said the seventy-year-old director to Euronews.

He never discussed this with his family, so he was shocked when he discovered that four of his uncles had been forcibly sterilized.

"They were sterilized because they were poor. Their crime was poverty," he adds.

Sweden implemented a eugenics program based on the science of racial biology between 1934 and 1976. It was the first country in Europe to later abolish forced sterilization, but during that time, between 20,000 and 33,000 Swedes were forced to undergo sterilization.

The victims were mostly young people and predominantly women who were deemed "unfit," "rebellious," or "mixed." The Swedish authorities believed they were creating a society that would be envied by the rest of the world.

"They wanted to get rid of a certain type of people: the weakest," says Sundstedt.

While his mother managed to escape to the Swedish capital and avoid sterilization, her sister May-Britt was not as fortunate.

Their mother died when May-Britt was very young. Due to their poverty, the municipal child protection service intervened and demanded that May-Britt and her younger siblings who still lived at home undergo an intelligence test.

"During that period, they placed a lot of trust in intelligence tests; it was very important to them," says Sundstedt. These tests mainly consisted of knowledge-based questions, and since May-Britt and her siblings were poor and irregularly attended school, they couldn't answer them.

May-Britt scored below the threshold of "normal intelligence" and was classified as "mentally feeble." As a result, she was sent to Nanilund, a mental asylum.

"She was considered to have a mental illness because she constantly protested," the director recalls.

"Although they often administered IQ tests during her time there, they couldn't admit they were wrong," he adds.

Everyone who left the institution had to be sterilized; it was the rule, so May-Britt was transferred to another institution and underwent the operation.

"Her father didn't want her to be sterilized; he was against it, but he couldn't help," says Sundstedt.

At that time, the state-run sterilization program was not a secret. It was carried out in the light of public debate. There was "extensive propaganda and little criticism" within Swedish society, says Vidmalm.

"Herman Lundborg, the director of the State Institute for Racial Biology, feared a kind of 'racial suicide' as people with bad genes were reproducing more than the middle class," he says.

After a parliamentary investigation in the 1990s, the government offered compensation to the victims of forced sterilization. They created a financial compensation plan of 175,000 Swedish kronor (about 15,000 euros) for each victim.

In total, 3,000 compensation cases have been awarded, a very small number compared to the suspected number of people who were forcibly sterilized.